


To make a house a home

by Bumblie_Bee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bruce just wants everyone to remember he's not that sort of doctor, Fluff, Gen, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Lake House Shenanigans, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pepper just wants her idiots to be more careful, Peter just wants to get through the day without Pepper murdering him for the paint on her carpet, Tony just wants Peter to feel at home at the lake house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:41:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29112483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bumblie_Bee/pseuds/Bumblie_Bee
Summary: “It’s just brushing paint onto walls,” Tony says, rolling his eyes. “What could possibly go wrong?”The paint tin must have a sense of humour because there’s no way it takes that moment to release its sticky, suctioned grip on the lid by coincidence. The force of the screwdriver under Tony’s bodyweight launches it into the air where spins twice, bounces off the lid of Peter’s laptop, and then settles just millimetres shy of the edge of the dust sheet.Peter frowns at it, then glances up at Tony. “Do you want to make a list?”*Previously called Decorating and other fun father/son bonding activities
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Pepper Potts, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 7
Kudos: 90





	To make a house a home

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at [tumblr](https://bumblie-bee.tumblr.com)!

“I still can’t believe you’ve never decorated a room before,” Peter says for approximately the 72nd time since Tony had made the mistake of admitting to it two days ago.

For approximately the 71st time in two days, Tony rolls his eyes at the kid, who’s sat in the middle of his bedroom floor with his laptop on his knees and an entirely unnecessary video tutorial on cutting in the paint around a doorframe playing on the screen.

“Says the boy who is yet to learn the difference between a dog and a horse,” he mutters under his breath, the words just loud enough that he knows Peter will hear them over his video.

Peter indeed hears them and glances up to glare, missing out on surely what would have been a riveting five seconds of slow paintbrush action. 

“That was one time, Mr Stark,” he groans, pouting, before his eyes returned to his screen. “And it was a Shetland pony, they’re, like, nearly dogs. Dogs with manes. Neigh dogs.”

“Neigh dogs,” Tony scoffs under his breath. “Sometimes I wonder how you actually manage to make it out of bed and down for breakfast in the morning.” He scowls at the can of paint he’s been ineffectively prying at the lid of for the past few minutes, and then at the screwdriver he’s been using for leverage for good measure. “Also, remind me, how many rooms have you decorated before?”

Peter sighs without looking up from his laptop. “That’s different, I’m not allowed to paint my walls, they’re rented. You have like four houses, six apartments, an entire skyscraper, and like, a hundred buildings in the compound you could paint if you wanted to.”

The laugh Tony can’t quite contain catches Peter’s attention and he looks around, a faux glare still on his brow. “Okay, so, first, your counting skills are definitely not up to scratch, Pete. And second, I don’t need to decorate any of the thousands of rooms I own in these hundreds of buildings. I pay people to do it for me. One of the many pros of being a billionaire, kiddo.”

Peter scoffs. He glances back at his laptop, frowns at the dull as dishwater video, and then shuts the lid. “Okay, but if you employ like billions of people to do this sort of thing, why are we, who have no experience with decorating whatsoever, doing it?”

“Bonding.” Tony looks up from his paint can to find the brows over Peter’s eyes are raised comically in disbelief. 

“Bonding?” 

“Yeah, you know, a good bit of quality father-son time,” he grunts through clenched teeth as he prises at the lid. “A shared task is good for strengthening relationships… or something like that.”

“Right,” Peter agrees dubiously. He gets to his feet and stretches. “So, um, have you been on ‘mum’s net’ again by any chance? Because Pepper says it gives you funny ideas and makes you even more paranoid than normal, and like, I’ve never seen you change a lightbulb outside of the lab so this definitely counts as abnormal.”

“My wife is a traitor,” Tony grumbles as he puts more of his weight onto the screwdriver, grunting in frustrating when the lid stays stubbornly fixed.

“Anyway Tony, we don’t have to spend our time together doing this. We could be in the lab, or watching a movie, or… or walking Gerald. Or just, you know, doing something we actually enjoy and know how to do.”

Tony glances up at his frowning, slightly anxious kid and gives him what he hopes is a comforting smile but probably turns into more of a strained grimace as he pushes on the can. “Ah Pete, where’s the fun in that.”

“Um, in like, not having to scrub paint out of the carpet before Pepper murders us?” Peter suggests. “You know she definitely could take us if she wanted to. Like, both at the same time probably.” He pauses, then pointedly adds, “I bet she’d be able to get the lid off that can too, actually.”

Tony sniffs indignantly, mutters, “Little shit,” under his breath just loud enough for the kid to know he’s teasing, although honestly, Peter’s probably onto something there.

Smirking in victory, Peter rocks on his heels, and then he drops down onto the floor beside Tony with a sigh.

“Look, Tony, I know you just want to make it nice for me, and I really appreciate it, but the room’s really great as it is, honestly.”

“It’s really great for a guest room.”

“It’s great for my room too,” the kid argues, bouncing his leg. “Seriously.”

Tony flaps a hand dismissively. “Pete, it’s just a spot of decorating,” he says, shooting his kid a smile as he leans on the screwdriver again. “It’ll be fun, relaxing. And you need ‘relaxing’.”

Peter sighs, either doesn’t have the energy protest or doesn’t disagree, and drops his head into a hand. “Okay, okay, but what if we make the room worse. What if it goes wrong?”

“It’s just brushing paint onto walls,” Tony says, rolling his eyes. “What could possibly go wrong?”

The paint tin must have a sense of humour because there’s no way it takes that moment to release its sticky, suctioned grip on the lid by coincidence. The force of the screwdriver under Tony’s bodyweight launches it into the air where spins twice, bounces off the lid of Peter’s laptop, and then settles just millimetres shy of the edge of the dust sheet.

Peter frowns at it, then glances up at Tony. “Do you want to make a list?”

“Wow, it’s very bright,” Pepper announces half an hour later, peeking her head around the door and surveying the activity inside. “Very orange.”

“Yeah, it’s nice, isn’t it!” Peter grins at her from his perch on the ladder he’s up to cut in against the edge of the sloping ceiling. There’s paint on his nose and more on his shirt which is sure to be a pain to get out but Tony smiles to himself at the kid’s enthusiasm.

It’s nice to see Peter bright and bubbly again; the anxiety of earlier in the day hadn’t exactly been a one off occurrence. Since he returned from being snapped, Peter’s been not quite himself, anxious and a slightly withdrawn, a little down when he doesn’t think anyone’s around to notice, and although Tony gets it, understands that coming back after five years that haven’t passed at all to him to find the world in ruins and his second home destroyed and Tony very nearly dead on the battlefield had been a lot, he just wants Peter to be happy.

He deserves to be happy.

He’s been seeing a therapist for a few months now and it had been helping, but then that shitshow in Europe had happened and everything had taken a turn for the worse again.

Tony doesn’t know quite what went down between Peter and Beck, doesn’t know what he was seeing in the illusions he’d been stuck in before that asshole had hit his child with a train, but he thinks Peter’s sudden increase in anxiety and difficulty sleeping might have been spurred by that.

He always wants Tony to tell him something only he would know when he pulls him from the throes of a nightmare, needs to make sure he’s okay.

It’s the times he doesn’t quite believe Tony’s still alive that hurt the most.

The times when tears fall warm and silent down Peter’s stricken face.

“It’s lovely and warm, Peter, a really good choice,” Pepper tells him still looking at the paint with a smile Tony understands means she’s noticed his brightness too before she frowns at something and turns to him. “Anthony, dearest, how are you planning on getting the paint off the light?” she asks, sugar sweet and all the more terrifying for it. “And off the door? And the curtains? And out of your hair, actually?”

Tony reaches up, feels the tackiness gunking his greying hair into hardening clumps, and fights back a groan.

They’re getting into the swing of things before long, Peter making good progress cutting in along his second sloped ceiling while Tony works on the skirtings and Friday plays what Tony thinks might be Peter’s running playlist based on the energy levels of the songs.

Or maybe he just always listens to music like that.

Honestly, Tony wouldn’t be surprised.

He’s just about to finish neatly lining paint along the doorframe when there’s a creak behind him, a panicked gasp in place of the next loudly and pitchily sung line of “Shake it up”, and then an almighty clattering crash that echoes around the room and jolts the paintbrush in his hand.

When Tony turns away from the now ruined door, he finds part of the previously cream carpet is stained a vibrant orange, and in the middle of the patch sits a fallen ladder, an upturned can, and Peter, splattered from head to toe in paint and staring wide eyed at his very clearly broken left wrist.

“Oh, shit.”

“I still don’t get it,” Tony says three quarters of an hour later as he paces back and forth across the med bay floor, “I’ve seen you balance on power cables, walk across the wires of the Brooklyn Bridge. Peter, just the other day you video called me while lounging on the single piece of web you’d stuck between Lady Liberty’s head and her torch, how on earth do you of all people break your arm decorating?!”

“It might not be broken,” a damp-haired but mostly paint-free Peter mutters indignantly, flushing a little at the scathing look Tony shoots him because there is no way he’s not very aware that’s a downright lie. There’s a literal bend in his arm where there shouldn’t be, the sort that Bruce had winced at before gently slipping the limb back into the sling and ushering him down the corridor for an x-ray.

“And it wasn’t like I fell. Okay, no, I did fall,” he corrects at the raised brow he receives, “but I didn’t lose my balance. The paint tin did. Or it slipped, anyway, and I tried to grab it so it didn’t land on the carpet but then the whole ladder tipped over and it fell and I fell and the paint fell and I landed really weirdly because I was still trying to catch the tin and - oh god-” Peter groans and rests his head in his good hand- “your carpet. Pepper’s going to kill me. I should have just broken my neck instead and saved her the hassle.”

A laugh slips out before Tony reins himself in and rests a comforting hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, she’s not going to murder you. Mo would be much too upset. She’ll probably just lock you in the lounge with May’s turkey meatloaf for sustenance and Mo’s entirely Frozen collection set to play on a loop for the next 14 years so we can still use you as a childminding service whenever we need a night out.”

Peter groans again and flops back onto his pillow. “Frozen and May’s meatloaf? That’s definitely worse.”

“Oh, okay, so it isn’t broken.” Tony holds Bruce’s recently snatched away tablet at arm’s length because he definitely needs reading glasses but no, he’s not getting any, and raises his brows at the image on the screen.

Peter blinks, looks up from his phone. He’s been staring at it through opioid-glazed eyes for the past half an hour, half-heartedly watching a video Ned had sent him about the newest new Millennium Falcon Lego set, but now he turns his gaze to his arm instead.

It’s swollen beneath the icepack, bruising rapidly, and definitely deformed, which is probably why Peter frowns at it for a second clearly confused, and then sits up and looks at Tony with his eyebrows raised in surprise.

“Seriously?”

Tony nods, straight faced.

“Uh huh. Congratulations kid, its actually broken twice.” He turns the screen, allows Peter to look the black and white image of his bent forearm. The ulna is snapped clean through and displaced just below his wrist and his radius is rather impressively buckled. It only takes a few seconds of surveying before Peter collapses back on his bed with a groan and flings his non-doubly fractured arm over his eyes.

“Ah, crap.”

Tony would scold him for his language, but he thinks Peter’s got it just about right with that one.

“Four days?” Peter complains, dismayed, an hour later, as Bruce wraps fibreglass around his recently reset arm. “Why so long? It’ll be better in, like, two days, max!”

“It’s a bad break,” Bruce explains wearily, eyebrows puckered in concentration as he carefully shapes the cast. “You’re really lucky you didn’t need surgery on it. You’re lucky I’ve managed to realign it too, I’m-”

“Not that sort of doctor, I _know_.”

Tony takes pity, wraps an arm around Peter’s sagged shoulders and gives his upper arm a rub. There’s a smidgen of guilt stirring in his stomach at his kid’s upset. While he didn’t tip Peter off the ladder himself, and while he definitely would have preferred Peter to try to save himself rather than the carpet, it was his plan that put Peter in the position he fell from in the first place.

“Hey, I know it sucks, but it’s only four days, kid,” he comforts, laying off the teasing because between the strong meds he’s been given, the pain of recently having his badly broken arm reset, and the constant exhaustion left in the wake of his ongoing sleep issues, Peter’s looking a little too close to tears to risk it. “It’d be six weeks _minimum_ in a cast for most of us. Four days’ll go quick, you’ll see. And you get three days off school, it’ll be like a little holiday.”

“But I like school,” Peter sniffs, “And I have a Spanish test on Tuesday. And being stuck at home is boring. No offence.”

“Much taken,” Tony deadpans, hoping for an embarrassed flush from his teenager but getting none. “Look, there’s loads we can do though, Pete, it’ll be fun.”

A beat passes, and then a there’s a quiet but slightly curious, “Like what?”

And the thing is, Tony hadn’t actually thought that far in advance. They spend a lot of time together at weekends, but normally they’re playing games with Mo or fiddling in the lab or training up at the compound or attempting, and typically failing, to cook because Peter’s going to need to learn at least a little before he starts college and the idea of him being taught by May is truly terrifying, and none of those things are going to be possible with Mo at school and Peter sporting a couple of nasty fractures.

“We can watch movies,” he starts off with since they do that one anyway, “or… do jigsaw puzzles, or watch Gerald terrorise the wildlife, or steal Mo’s Hama beads and make pretty pictures … or paint pretty pictures your cast.”

Peter groans out a noise that’s almost a sob. “No. No more painting,” he moans, leaning his head into Tony’s shoulder, and in the second before Peter wipes his snotty nose on his jumper, Tony almost feels guilty for his quip.

“I really am sorry about the carpet,” the kid mutters that evening, startling Tony from his text simply because he’d be certain the kid had been asleep. He’s on the heavy duty pain meds now that the adrenaline has worn off entirely, the sort that normally would have knocked him out for the count, and he had been curled up under the blankets with his eyes closed before he spoke.

They’re open when Tony leans back to look at the face of kid slumped beside him, heavy lidded and a little glassy but focused blearily on him and looking more than a little sad.

“Hey, it’s okay, Pepper’s sorting out a new one. It could probably have done with replacing anyway. Hasn’t been quite the same since Morgan let Gerald upstairs last year. He ate three block of Pepper’s favourite soap and then threw them up again all over the floor. Made an awful mess.

Peter snorts a little despite himself. “At least it was hygienic.”

“I’m not sure anything that to do with that animal is hygienic. And I’m not talking about Gerald.”

That earns him an actual laugh. It’s tired and a little croaky with sleep but genuine and that’s all that matters.

“You alright there, Pete?” he asks as the kid shuffles against his side and lets out a drowsy little grunt. He’d check his watch, but he knows they’re still hours short of Peter’s next does of painkillers and judging by the way the kid frowns as he attempts to push himself a little more upright, he doesn’t think its his arm that’s bothering him anyway.

“Yeah, ‘m good.” Peter arches his back with a slight grimace, stiff after having slept curled up for so long, and then once he’s settles a little more comfortably against Tony’s side, sighs contently. He rests his head against Tony’s shoulder for a moment, and then frowns down at the casted arm resting on a stack of pillows beside him. The bag of ice resting on top has long since melted, the condensated water that had dripped onto the cushion now mostly evaporated. He could probably do with a new one, but Tony doesn’t want to disturb him by getting up to get one just yet.

It might be the meds, but Peter’s looking entirely at ease for the first time in a while.

“Actually, Tony,” the kid starts slowly, thoughtfully, a few seconds later. “Could Pepper maybe not get a new carpet put down just yet?”

Tony grimace at the thought. “We’re not leaving it like that Pete, it looks like someone exploded a traffic cone in the middle of your floor.”

“No, no I know,” Peter mollifies quickly. “It’s just, I thought maybe it would be better to replace the carpet afterwards.”

“After what?”

“After we finish painting.”

It takes Tony’s brain a second to process what Peter’s said through sheer disbelief. “After we- Pete, Pepper’s people will sort out the paint when they come to replace the carpet. Remember the thousands of people I employ so paint the rooms in my thousands of houses?”

The joke gets ignored, and when Peter looks up there’s a furrow between his brows. “But I want to?”

“You want to?” Tony repeats. He frowns down at the kid half asleep on the sofa and coughs out a laugh. “I thought you’d be scared for life after what happened today. I was about to call your therapist and add paintbrushes and masking tape to the trauma list.”

Peter rolls his eyes. It’s a little slow, uncoordinated, but a very Peter response and Tony can’t help but smile.

“I’m serious, Tony,” he whines, sitting up a little so he can fix Tony with a glare. “Father-son bonding. You said it yourself.”

Whether it’s the pair of slightly glazed, sleep heavy Bambi eyes, or the pitiful begging expression, or the red and blue cast resting on the cushion beside his kid that he still feels more than a little guilty about, Tony doesn’t know, but he just can’t help but relent. “Okay. Okay,” he sighs, dragging a hand over his face. “If that’s really, honestly what you want to do-”

“It is,” Peter interrupts eagerly.

“-then next weekend, when your arm has healed and my poor heart has had enough of a break from your stressful shenanigans, we can have another go.”

Peter grins wearily in victory and leans back against Tony with a heavy sigh.

“Thanks, Dad,” he mutters drowsily, burrowing his head a little deeper into Tony’s neck.

Tony rolls his eyes at the name because he knows, _thinks_ , Peter’s teasing, but his dismissal is definitely more show than for anything else. It’s scrapped entirely when Peter, high on pain meds and half asleep already, lets out a long, heavy breath and mutters, “Love you 3000,” under his breath as his eyes droop closed.

He hums contently when an arm wraps around his body and holds him tight, and Tony’s already warm heart swoops a little more.

“Yeah, you should do, kid,” Tony says, resting his head against his kid’s. “And I love you 3000 too.”

When Pepper comes in after putting Morgan to bed to tell them the second guest room is made up for the night, she finds her husband asleep, dozing open mouthed in front of a quietly rolling Star Wars episode with a blanket over his knees and Peter, sound asleep and entirely relaxed and drooling a little into Tony’s shoulder, held securely in his arms.

If she snaps a picture and sends it to May, well, they don’t need to know.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always loved :)


End file.
